US election: debate on academic freedom
Posted on 07. Nov, 2008 by admin in Academic Freedom, News
The Wall Street Journal reports that during the US Presidential election in October, the University of Nebraska rescinded an invitiation to William Ayers. This has started a debate in US circles about the nature of academic freedom.
Mr Ayers, the controvesial co-founder of the Weather Underground and the man responsible for bombing a number of federal buildings in the 1960s, was a focus of the Republican campaign against President-elect Barack Obama. Mr Obama and Mr Ayers served on a community board together early in Mr Obama’s political career.
The critical WSJ reports:
“It’s a major infringement on academic freedom,” David Moshman, an educational psychology professor told the Lincoln, Neb., Journal Star. Mr. Moshman called the decision “a dangerous precedent.” The one upside to the publicity surrounding this controversy, he said, was that the university “may also get a major lesson in academic freedom.”
Lately, it seems, Mr. Ayers, an education professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has become something of a poster child for “academic freedom.” An online petition signed by more than 3,000 educators explained: “The attacks on and the character assassination of Ayers threaten the university as a space of open inquiry and debate, and threaten schools as places of compassion, imagination, curiosity, and free thought.”
A separate article, also on the WSJ discusses the academic freedom controversy. This article cites the American Association of University Professor, which defines academic freedom as:
1) the right to research a topic relevant to one’s field of expertise,
2) the right to publish those results subject to the appropriate reviews [e.g., journal peer review, publisher's reviews, not administrative review],
3) the right to teach these views in the classroom subject to relevance of subject matter [John Dewey believed that it was an abuse of freedom in the classroom for an instructor to "promulgate as truth ideas or opinions which have not been tested." Mr. Dewey's point suggests that indoctrination occurs whenever an instructor insists that students accept as truth propositions that are in fact professionally contestable."], and
4) the right to hold views as a citizen in public debate without sanction by the university (see AAUP 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure). Students have no such rights, for example, except by custom based on misunderstanding of these principles.
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